The Healer's warning.
I. HE WHO WARNS HAS THE RIGHT TO SPEAK. It is not a mere stranger who comes up. He who speaks has rendered the greatest services to the man he addresses, and his warning for the future is based on his service in the past. So to speak, the healing would have been incomplete but for the giving of the warning. There are diseases the origin of which is not traceable; there are other diseases distinctly traceable to the evil doing of those who suffer from them. This man might surely have said, even as did the Samaritan woman, "Here is One who told me all that ever I did." Many would speak to the healed man, and their utterances would only move him to say that they knew not what they were talking about. "Sin no more," says Jesus. That seemed to point back to. some act or course of evil doing far away in the past, forgotten by most who had ever known it, and to many not known at all. But he who had the power to heal had also the power to know. If in after years this man neglected the warning and fell into suffering, all the bitterer would that suffering be in recollecting that he was so clearly forewarned against it.
II. JESUS WOULD HAVE HEALTH RESTORED, WHATEVER THE CAUSE OF ITS LOSS MIGHT BE. Jesus did not come first of all to the impotent man, reminding him that all these long years of infirmity were the consequence of his own evil doing. The man knew that well enough, and in all likelihood lamented bitterly over his folly. All sufferers demand sympathy; sufferers through their sin most of all. Jesus did not bean lecturing the impotent man as he lay by the pool. He healed him first, and then spoke plainly, even severely, to him after.
III. WHAT JESUS GIVES MAN MUST GUARD. While this poor man lay helpless, many temptations passed him by. Now that he was well again, temptations would crowd in upon him. The tempter says, "You are getting old; the years are few: make up for what you lost all the time you were so helpless." Jesus could easily make fresh physical energy pour into every organ and member of this disabled man. But when it; was a question of making him spiritually strong, then he had to be appealed to in a very warning way. What a dreadful possibility Jesus presents to the man! "A worse thing may happen to thee." What can be worse than a life of physical suffering? And yet there are degrees even in that. More sin might mean even worse bodily suffering, though it is almost certain Jesus meant the ruin of the whole nature.
IV. THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF HEALTH. Those in full vigour of body and mind must not be astonished when they are spoken to plainly. If they are not careful, their very strength and capability work out all the more evil. When we mourn over promising lives made useless by bodily infirmity, we must remember another aspect of bodily infirmity, namely, that people who might have done great mischief have thereby been made harmless.—Y.